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Is Haagen-Dazs bee-ing wise with their money?

Haagen-Dazs has pledged $125,000 to Penn State to support honey bee research. The money’s going to some pretty interesting projects, to say the least, but that’s the beauty of being a research university.

Two Haagen-Dazs Graduate Fellowships in Pollinator Health will be created that include $25,000 stipends. The fellows will “be working on topics such as pathogens of bees and native pollinators, the role of pesticides in declining bee health, parasites of bees, effects of infectious disease on bee physiology, and ecology and manipulation of native bees.”

The Citizen-Based Native Bee Survey will receive $15,000 to support its ongoing effort to figure out how many bees are in PA.

$45,000 of the money will go towards a machine that allows researches to figure out what pollutants and pesticides are in pollen, wax, and bees themselves.

The Pollinator Education Program run by the Master Gardener Program will receive $15,000. Not sure if the pollinators are the ones being educated though.

To paraphrase Mark Twain: The reports of higher education’s death have been an exaggeration. American universities produce more research and relevant knowledge for the world at large than any other institutions I know of. Tuition may be too damn high, but over the long-run, undergraduate degrees are definitely worth the cost. But Penn State could be so much more. It used to be, I think.